The present invention relates to fault management of a broadband network and more specifically to fault management of a xDSL network.
As networks develop to provide more sophisticated services to consumers, such as broadband services including video, telephony, and data services, networks become more complicated to manage. Some network components include the ability to report problems to a central location. Also, some networks do not have this ability and rely on manual referrals from representatives who have inspected the network. Once receiving an indication of an alarm at the central location, a service representative manually filters and correlates the alarm. Although the network is able to report a failure, the network has little or no filtering or correlation capabilities and cannot automatically map the failure to the customers that would be affected by the failure. Thus, the service representative manually analyzes the failure, determines the cause of the failure, and correlates customers affected by the failure. In order to determine the cause and the customers affected, the service representative must have extensive knowledge of the network, the network topology, and customer records.
With the large number of alarms the service provider receives, the process of analyzing an alarm becomes very time consuming and costly. Additionally, by the time the problem is isolated, if the problem is isolated at all, another customer may have already called the service representative and had the problem isolated. Thus, all the efforts of the service representative analyzing the failure were wasted.